"The petition, disclosed Wednesday in an eBay regulatory filing, asks
the Supreme Court to hear an appeal on whether eBay and other companies
held liable for patent infringement should be routinely subject to
injunctions while such cases are on appeal."

The patent insanity continues but maybe someone like Ebay can help correct things.

Hot-swapping with SCA

With SCA, it is possible to hot-plug devices. Unfortunately, this is
not as simple as it should be, but it is both possible and safe.

Replace the RAID device, disk device, and host/channel/id/lun numbers
with the appropriate values in the example below:

Dump the partition table from the drive, if it is still
readable:

sfdisk -d /dev/sdb > partitions.sdb

Remove the drive to replace from the array:

raidhotremove /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1

Look up the Host, Channel, ID and Lun of the drive to replace,
by looking in

/proc/scsi/scsi

Remove the drive from the bus:

echo "scsi remove-single-device 0 0 2 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi

Verify that the drive has been correctly removed, by looking in

/proc/scsi/scsi

Unplug the drive from your SCA bay, and insert a new drive

Add the new drive to the bus:

echo "scsi add-single-device 0 0 2 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi

(this should spin up the drive as well)

Re-partition the drive using the previously dumped partition
table:

sfdisk /dev/sdb < partitions.sdb

Add the drive to your array:

raidhotadd /dev/md0 /dev/sdb2

The arguments to the "scsi remove-single-device" commands
are: Host, Channel, Id and Lun. These numbers are found in the
"/proc/scsi/scsi" file.

The above steps have been tried and tested on a system with IBM SCA
disks and an Adaptec SCSI controller. If you encounter problems or
find easier ways to do this, please discuss this on the linux-raid
mailing list.

"According to a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic
Research, rapid development of a science and technology base by
populous Asian countries soon may threaten the economic position of the United States.
Not only is the U.S. losing ground in high technology exports, but its
very capacity to develop new technologies is declining rapidly with
respect to the rest of the world. According to Richard Freeman, the paper's author, the sheer population of Asian countries may allow them to train more scientists and engineers than the U.S. while devoting a smaller share of their economy to science and technology." From the article: "The
phenomenal growth of China's industrial base has been widely
publicized, but Freeman focuses on what is perhaps the more important
long-term indicator of a nation's prosperity - its re-investment in
science and technology education.
"

Here's an excellent article on how there's no replacement for excellent programmers; a rant I go on fairly often as people try to "commoditize" creative work ... and don't ever let yourself believe that developing software isn't a creative endeavor:

"... does it even make sense to talk about having the "best programmers?"
Is there so much variation between programmers that this even matters?

Maybe it's obvious to us, but to many, the assertion still needs to be proven."